Some Thoughts on Dickens and Popular Literature

Wednesday, December 30, 2015

Right now I am reading Bleak House. I haven't read any Dickens in longer than I can remember. I read most, if not all, of his novels when I was very young and then burned out on him. A few of his novels have really stuck in my memory but Bleak House is not one of them. All I really remember is that there is a case of spontaneous combustion in the book at some point which I found disturbing as a child.

I am about a third of the way through the book right now and I am finding it fascinating. Fascinating, not necessarily because of the story itself though that is good, but because of what constituted popular literature in Dickens' day. His books were immensely popular. They were serialized in magazines and newspapers and people waited eagerly for the next installment. So eagerly that when The Old Curiosity Shop was being serialized crowds waited at the docks in New York desperate to find out what happened to Little Nell. I read somewhere that the poor and illiterate would pay to have the latest installment read to them.

And now we view Dickens as difficult. If you ask the average person to read Dickens they are going to refuse, probably with memories of high school forced readings of A Tale of Two Cities. If someone finds you voluntarily reading Dickens they are likely to view you as a bit of a show off.

How have we gone from a world that goes crazy over Dickens to a world that goes crazy over Fifty Shades of Grey?

I know there are beautifully written, literary works of fiction being produced in our day. However, those are not usually the ones that take the average reader by storm. Dickens did in his day though. I wonder what makes the difference. Obviously many in his day were not well educated. Many were just average people. But now, reasonably well educated, average people view Dickens and authors like him as too difficult. So many popular authors of their day such as Jane Austen, Fanny Burney, Charles Dickens, and Anthony Trollope have now become challenging. But when they wrote they were what the average person read. They were the popular authors of their day.

Occasionally, I worry for our day. I worry about a world that won't commit to an eight-hundred page novel but instead wants everything in 140 character tweets. (Though the thought of trying to condense Bleak House into a series of tweets sounds like it could be entertaining.) I am not sure what it is. Do we have less time? A shorter attention span? Has our reading style really been dumbed down? Are we less literate? Do we have too many distractions? I don't know. Maybe it is a bit of all of that.

But Dickens should be read. His characters are clear and appealing. So many have become part of our language, Scrooge, for example. His depiction of London and the England of his day is enthralling and horrifying in equal parts. His ability to tell a story is obvious. He had his flaws like any author does, I don't always feel drawn to his female characters, but what really amazes me on rereading him is just how readable he is. He knows how to hook a reader. That is why they waited on the docks for the next installment of The Old Curiosity Shop. He had them in the palm of his hand. He was a consummate storyteller.

4 comments

I think part of it is just volume: there are gazillions of books vying for our attention now. All the books written over the past couple centuries PLUS the oodles that are being published and self-published now. It can be overwhelming! Some people (like me) choose to turn their backs on most modern books and focus on older ones. Others do the opposite.

(But I'm not a big Dickens fan. It's a personal issue with his style: he's generally just too cutesy with his names and having everyone secretly related to everyone else and how everything Means Something.... But I really like A Tale of Two Cities.)

I agree that there is a huge volume of books to choose from today. I just find the difference in what becomes popular literature very interesting.

I know what you mean by the cutesy aspect but I can forgive it for the bigness of the story. I hadn't read him in years and was surprised by how much fun it was, actually. He isn't a favorite author but I did enjoy the melodrama.

"How have we gone from a world that goes crazy over Dickens to a world that goes crazy over Fifty Shades of Grey?"

great question! great post. I think that written reviews and written thoughts about literature are the perfect place for a person who likes books, who likes to read. But weirdly now we have the success of booktube, who took such awfull ways to keep a channel alive, and have become a lazy place to talk about books. That´s why it is really good to find a blog like yours :)